From ‘health remedies’ ads to Directives 92/28/EEC and 2001/83/EC: advertising medicinal products in the press (19th-21st c.)

his paper proposal intends to explore how ‘products aimed at improving one’s health and well-being’ (from drugs to remedies of any sort) went from being widely advertised in the press, in the 19th century, to being banned at European level around the turn of this century. In order to explore this change, British newspapers and periodicals will be consulted, to collect advertisements of medicinal and other similar products, and investigate a) what kinds of products were advertised, b) whether there were any relevant changes in the categories of products advertised, c) what linguistic strategies (at the lexical, syntactic, rhetorical and discursive level in general) were employed to advertised them. The method employed will combine studies on domain-specific languages (medical English in particular) for the lexical aspect, but also drawing from approaches in argumentation, media studies, advertising and discourse analysis. Legal discourse considerations will also be necessary, in order to firstly define terms such as ‘(prescription) drug’, ‘medicinal product’, ‘remedy’, etc. and, secondly, to understand the rules introduced by the European directives that started to regulate the field at the end of the 20th century. The investigation is expected to illustrate the development of drug (and related products) advertising – and the language used to do so – in Britain, from the 19th century to the 21st century, from a linguistic perspective that attempts to bring together advertising, health dissemination, consumer protection and supranational legislation.